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Blame successive governments for NNPC inefficiency – Ogbeifun

By on August 7, 2015

A former President of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, Dr. Louis Ogbeifun, said successive governments should be blamed for the inability of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to deliver value as done by other national oil companies.
Ogbeifun, who said this during a farewell visit to the PENGASSAN national secretariat as he bows out of the service of the NNPC as Manager, Employee Relations, said Nigerians deserved to know how successive governments willfully tied the hands of the NNPC with cuffs, shackles of state apparatus, red bureaucratic tapes and unnecessary policy summersaults to bar it from achieving world-class status.
He said, “The oil and gas industry is in a parlous state and needs radical transformation for optimisation of the hydrocarbon potential in the country.
“However, in taking the steps to reform the industry, government must be very mindful of the grave implications of taking the wrong approach in the reformation process. The NNPC is a product of the Nigerian state and it will be wrong to demonise NNPC workers in a conspiracy of successive governments.”
Ogbeifun, who is the current President of the Institute of Mediators and Conciliators of Nigeria, said the legal basis for the creation of the NNPC from inception was at variance with any world-class commercial orientation paradigm as in the case of other national oil companies.
He added, “Whereas, governments in all the wholly owned companies in other climes allow the companies to run without interference by collecting taxes, royalties etc.; the successive governments in Nigeria determines otherwise.
“In the leading NOCs, the leadership structure outlives many political leaderships. But what is the NNPC story? Under President Jonathan alone, NNPC had five Group Managing Directors in less than five years. It also by extension had about ten GMDs in about a decade. One of the GMDs even spent about four days in office.
“Even a primary school management cannot have such a high turnover nor do I know of any oil and gas company in the world with such unpalatable turnover and still working.”
Ogbeifun said, sadly, not many people knew that some oil and gas projects of the NNPC got stuck for two years waiting for approval at the level of the Federal Executive Council.
He said by the time the approval was given, some of those concepts would have been overtaken by technology, inflation would have led to cost variants and would need a representation and gradually fades off.
He added, “In addition, whereas many oil corporations can fire and hire the next day according to the needs and exigencies of operations, time was in NNPC when the government embargoed its recruitment process for almost a decade.
“Recently, the organisation has been battling government’s bureaucracies to replenish its identified skill gaps since 2012 to no avail. Which country runs its oil industry or its national oil corporation like that?”
He said doing anything outside the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in unbundling the NNPC would only complicate the contestations and dysfunction in the oil and gas industry.

 

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